In late January my friend Deb texted me a blurry photo of Michael Cera holding a tub of moisturizer outside a pharmacy and asked, in complete sincerity, whether I had known he invented CeraVe. Deb is a smart person. Deb does not work in marketing. Deb was fully prepared to believe it.
Over the next two weeks it kept arriving. Cera photographed handing out product on the street. Cera turning up where a dermatology crowd was gathered. Clips stitched onto clips, people squinting at the name on the bottle and doing the arithmetic out loud. The brand said nothing. Its representatives, asked directly, declined to confirm or deny, which is the most expensive sentence in public relations and worth every cent here.
Then the game on the eleventh, the reveal, and the joke landing on its feet.
For a fortnight CeraVe gave people something to do instead of something to watch, and that is the entire mechanism of the best campaign of this Super Bowl.
Three things made it work, and none of them was the celebrity.
One. The seed was already in the wild. People have been making the Cera joke about that bottle in comment sections for years. The brand did not invent an observation, it found one already sitting there and paid it off. That is the difference between a stunt that spreads and a stunt that has to be pushed.
Two. The nerve. Everything in a marketing organization pulls toward confirming early, because an unconfirmed thing cannot be measured on Monday and somebody has to report a number. Holding silence for two full weeks while strangers argue about your product on the internet takes a client who understands that the argument is the media buy.
Holding silence for two full weeks while strangers argue about your product on the internet takes a client who understands that the argument is the media buy.
Three. The payoff did not cost the brand anything it needed. CeraVe still sells itself as developed with dermatologists, still lives in the boring white-bottle aisle, still has the ceramides on the back. The gag ran alongside the positioning instead of on top of it. Compare that to brands that spend a fortune being funny for one night and teach nobody anything about the product.
The lesson I keep writing in the margins of decks is this. Mystery is a budget line. Not knowing is a thing audiences will work at, and the work is what makes them care. Most briefs I see are structured to eliminate any possibility of a person having to wonder about anything, then ask why engagement is soft.
I bought a tub at the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne last week, entirely because of a joke about an actor. Barnaby knocked the lid into it on Saturday and has shown no remorse whatsoever.